Baxter was right about the show chatter. He repeated his “Best Wishes/Congratulations” confusion for the audience. Hughes cheerfully supplied the answer: You congratulate a groom, but merely wish a bride well. “Although I have no idea why,” he said with good-natured bemusement.
“I know,” I piped up. “I read a book once. It was called Miss . . .” I hesitated. Would Hughes Sinclair really want his wife to admit on national television that her entire knowledge of etiquette was based on a book on cultural assimilation from 1910?
“Um, ‘Miss Somebody’s guide to, um, cultural stuff,’?” I blurted out. Hughes raised an eyebrow in a subtle way that the cameras didn’t pick up. He knew that whatever my faults, I had a good memory. Miss Somebody’s Guide to Cultural Stuff? I felt a pang of guilt. Miss Liberty had helped me so much and now I was brushing her off as if I was too good for her. But, after all, I was no longer a little immigrant girl with crooked teeth and dorky Old World parents.
I got the teeth fixed years ago. Sure, I still had the dorky Old World parents, but I also had a husband, a very sophisticated, very American, very establishment husband. I didn’t need to go babbling on about outdated advice from Miss Liberty.
“Anyway, Miss, um, somebody or other, said it’s because of the historic inequity in divorce law.”
As I said this, I realized for the first time that Miss Liberty was making a political statement, a rather radical one for her time. Why do you wish a bride well, but congratulate a groom? “Because of the inequity in divorce law.” Hee. The old gal had a bit of spunk, I guess. And here I had treated her as if she was simply an objective arbiter of etiquette.
“Ah,” said Hughes. “But we don’t need to worry about that.”
He patted my knee. I patted his hand that was on my knee. Then I said: “Enough about us.”
That night when I watched the tape over, I thought, That’s it, that’s the moment the rest of my life begins.
I was either quite right or very wrong, depending on how you look at it.
Then I turned the tape off, even though we were just ten minutes into the three-hour show. Now that I was living with and loving Hughes, I did not have as much time for endless tape analysis. Or surfing the Web. Or counting my steps, for that matter. Marriage had turned my life upside down!
But if I had continued watching the tape, I might have wondered about the next news story, the one that Hughes reported while I was off stage getting my makeup touched up. He told our viewers that there were rumors that the first lady/Ohio senator was locked in a fierce battle with the National Enquirer over some sort of photo they wanted to publish. Hughes noted drily that some bloggers were speculating that the photos had something to do with the first lady’s previous and much-mocked relationship with Latin singer Ricky Martin. “The first lady’s office says, however, that she is not actually pictured in the photographs,” Hughes said.
He turned to Baxter. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense at all. If she’s not in the pictures, what does she care what they show?”
And Baxter said, “I have no idea. But everybody will care about this weather we’re having.”
Chapter 19
My life story, I suppose, can be summed up by four photographs. The cotton ball one, naturally. The barefoot wedding photo, unfortunately. The one of me in handcuffs, almost certainly. And most importantly, the one of me and the president.
Two of those photographs were released within days of each other. I was, in fact, hanging a framed wedding photo in my office at the moment I heard about the release of the presidential photo. I had kicked off my shoes and hiked my skirt up a bit to crawl up on a bookcase to hammer the nail, and I had asked an office assistant to hand me the frame. He shocked me by saying the first negative thing about the happy turn of events my life had taken. “I’m afraid,” he said, glancing at my bare feet in the office and my bare feet in the photo, “that I’m not wild about the shoeless element. Is it supposed to be like the Beatles?” He altered his voice to sound spooky and conspiratorial. “‘Paul is dead. Paul is dead.’?”
I snatched the frame from him a little roughly but did not respond, not knowing exactly what to say. (I was a little fuzzy on the whole Paul-is-dead phenomenon. It happened before I was born, first of all. And then there was the cultural issue.)
Still, the suggestion that Hughes’s and my bare feet were something sinister and death-related, rather than refreshing and real, startled me and gave me a chill. And before I could recover, Hughes walked into the room and said: “Addison, honey, we need to talk.”
The office assistant excused himself, and I climbed down from the bookcase, slipped my shoes back on, and plopped down on a chair. I had a sick feeling. Something has happened to my family, I thought. What else could it be?
Hughes blinked three times. (I remember that quite distinctly and still wonder what it means. He was not lying, obviously.) “Cal thought I should be the one to tell you,” he said.
He looked at his hands, then folded them in his lap and sighed. “I don’t know that he’s right.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Did you . . .” He looked at me, but then away. “Did you . . .”
This was the most inarticulate I had ever seen him. Suddenly, though, he simply spit it out. “Did you have a relationship with the president?”
I am quite glad that Hughes looked again at his shoes at that moment, because the look of realization and horror that swept across my face could have been easily misinterpreted as guilt or shame.
“Of course not,” I whispered finally.
Hughes nodded. “No, I wouldn’t think so.” He flicked some lint on his leg. “The suits alone would be a turnoff.”
I didn’t respond.
“And the chin,” Hughes said. He shuddered.
“But there’s this photo,” Hughes said. He pulled a torn newspaper page from his pocket and unfolded it carefully. It was the Enquirer.
You know what it looked like. There is no need for me to go into detail about my skintight parachute pants splayed across the president’s lap, his mouth open on mine, my eyes flashing him a horrified look that an alarming number of people mistook for feisty flirtatiousness. My shirt gaped at the neckline and apparently, judging from the commentary later, no decent woman had ever before been betrayed by a gaping shirt. (Ann Coulter, in her typical fashion, later wrote that if a lady’s shirt gapes open it’s because the lady wants it to.)
I glanced at the photo and put my hands up in front of my eyes. “I don’t want to see it,” I said, though I already had. I told Hughes the whole story then, starting with my desperate attempt to escape being photographed next to a pig and ending with the first lady pulling me aside to discuss my skinny ass and my big lips.
“Baxter saw the whole thing,” I said. “At least I think he saw most of it.” I paused. “I think David Souter did, too. And Christine Todd Whitman. And maybe Teddy Kennedy.”
“Teddy Kennedy was there?” Hughes said. “Great.”
A moment of silence. Hughes looked hurt and sad. He seemed to believe me. Why wouldn’t he? I don’t think he could imagine that any woman he knew would ever consider a dalliance with a man who buys suits off the rack—even if he is the leader of the free world.
For a moment, Hughes looked smaller to me, and I realized with a start that he was, ever so slightly, slumping. He must be really upset, I thought.
Suddenly I was filled with a steely resolve. I think if the photo had come out a month earlier, right after it had been taken, I would have collapsed in humiliated despair. I would have resigned on the spot and just hoped for a gig on Celebrity Mole. I would have run back to Slater County and begged my parents to take me in, despite the shame.
But I had married the love of my life that weekend and now I was a fighter. I was a married woman, by golly, and though I would not have predicted that my marital status would matter in this situation, I realized at that moment that in some way it did. I had internalized at lea
st two cultures’ worth of sexism and I thought that the president could mess with Addison McGhee, but Addison McGhee Sinclair was a whole other matter.
(That was how I was thinking of myself, though my name on the show did not change. Cal had urged me to keep my maiden name professionally. “At least until we see how long this lasts,” he had muttered. I was terribly offended, but Hughes laughed it off. “Oh, Cal,” he had said, then laughed some more.)
I was ready to stand up for myself because it wasn’t just about me anymore. It was about my husband and—well—our children. (Hughes and I had not talked about whether to have children, but I assumed that we would. I had started taking a vitamin each morning and had quietly switched to decaf coffee in an effort to prepare my bones for pregnancy.)
I was the plucky immigrant kid who grew up to do well for herself, but it had mostly been a story of good luck and good timing and forgone meals—until that moment. At that moment, I became what any good immigrant kid should be—I became a fighter.
“This is the president’s problem,” I said. “It’s not mine. I’ll be damned if I let it hurt me.”
“Well, okay then,” Hughes said. He seemed surprised by my fierceness, and he patted my head as he hugged me. “Well, okay.”
That afternoon, I held a small press conference, making what I naively said would be my only statement on the matter. Hughes and Baxter both accompanied me to the front steps of the GUP building, where I stood before my colleagues in the press corps. My hair whipped a bit in the breeze, a couple of times blowing right into Baxter’s eyes. But he did not react. He and Hughes stood on each side of me with solemn dignity. And it was reassuring for me and for the nation, I think. My husband believed me. Good ol’ Baxter was my witness. There was nothing to worry about here.
“I think the president was feeling playful and silly,” I said. “And though it made me uncomfortable, I decided to merely remove myself from the situation and leave everyone in peace. I’m sorry the tabloid has decided against a similar philosophy.
“This is the sort of thing my family would chalk up to a cultural misunderstanding,” I concluded. And Hughes and Baxter nodded solemnly behind me.
Looking back on it now, it seems spineless to me. Why did I excuse the president’s behavior as “playful and silly”? Why did I pretend there could have been some sort of “cultural misunderstanding”?
But at the time, it was the most forceful thing I had ever done. I dared to offer my own version of events—albeit a fictional one. I did not laugh or make a joke. And I did not do what someone told me to do. It was, perhaps, spineless spin. But it was my spineless spin. And I was actually proud.
For the first time since my marriage, I logged onto the boards that night. I couldn’t believe how many people were posting now. Those publicity efforts for the boards must really be working. Plus, there had been a lot of news to discuss lately. The boards’ newcomers had analyzed everything from my blooming tumbleweed to Hughes’s slight hammertoe, which was evident in the wedding photo. They also went on and on about the photo of me and the president. But I couldn’t bear to read any of that. I just skimmed through the posts looking for anything from my buddies, Weatherjunkie and B-basher. Both were strangely silent. Weatherjunkie had written nothing at all lately, and B-basher only had one short post, saying that he didn’t understand why Baxter stood with me during my formal statement. “Who does he think he is?” B-basher said. “As if her husband weren’t support enough?”
I sighed, logged off. It was a rough few days. My brother reported that my parents started wearing disguises in public. My father, he said, would ask over and over again: “We came to America to live with this shame?” And my mother would reply: “I suppose we did.”
My new in-laws rather pointedly did not mention it. Unfair things were said about me—Why had I brought Baxter instead of my husband? Why had I worn such tight pants? And come on, could I really have been that afraid of a dead hog?
But it’s amazing sometimes how these things turn out. Soon the subject was neither my supposed “easiness” nor the president’s quite-real drinking problem. Somehow in the twisted way of the media age, the issue became the first lady. Why did she marry this guy? What was she thinking? Can she really be trusted to represent the good citizens of Ohio when she dates Latin singer Ricky Martin for two-odd years and then ups and marries a big loser like the president?
“I’ve seen the president up close,” The View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck said rather famously. “I don’t think he flosses.”
Barbara Walters gasped and replied: “No decent woman marries a man who doesn’t floss.”
It was terribly unfair. And I, of all people, probably should have said so. But I was too relieved that the discussion was no longer centering on me. So I kept quiet. Besides, I soon had another problem.
There had been some news from Vegas. A higher court had overturned the gay marriage ruling, and all the gay marriages of the past few weeks would be forcibly annulled.
I would like to say that I had some great opinion on this, being as I was a commentator on our society, an informed resident of the nation, an outspoken and thoughtful human being. But my mother-in-law was planning a reception for us, and I was overwhelmed with the details of the seating chart. I greeted the news with only passing interest. The images we were sent from Nevada seemed properly solemn. The clerks in each county scoured through the licenses, removing those of gay couples, and sending them before local judges. The judges were required by the higher court ruling to review the documents, stamp them ILLEGAL MARRIAGE, and mail them to the couples with a long-winded letter filled with legalese.
I knew this. I made some small talk on the air about it. But I confess I didn’t really think much of it—until I opened the mail and saw that Hughes and I had gotten one of those letters.
Chapter 20
Hughes had been nothing but a doting husband, but sometimes you have a sense about these things. A normal bride, I told myself, would laugh off this confusion. But I feared, somehow, that this would be more than just a minor annoyance.
In fact, I didn’t initially mention the letter to Hughes. I wanted to get it straightened out before I troubled him with it. Using all my journalistic savvy, I had within an hour or so tracked down the clerk who had culled our license and gotten him on the phone.
“I’m calling about the Hughes Sinclair–Addison McGhee marriage,” I explained.
And the clerk chuckled nervously. “I’ve been expecting this,” he said. “I knew the media would pick up on it.”
(Apparently, the clerk was paying more attention to the caller ID, listing my call as coming from GUP News, than he was my own stated identification as the bride. I decided not to say anything at this point; perhaps being in the media would prove advantageous in getting this straightened out quickly.)
“I don’t understand why this marriage was annulled,” I said.
“There was a court ruling,” the clerk said, continuing incredulously. “Surely, you’ve heard? They’re all being annulled.”
“All the gay marriages are,” I said. “Not all the marriages in the state.”
“I don’t know where you’re from, honey,” the clerk said. “But around here when a guy famous for wearing a lavender tie to the Super Bowl marries some dude named Addison, that’s a gay marriage.”
He paused, then added in a pointed way, “Oh wait, excuse me. I believe the tie was periwinkle.”
Now I was the one to chuckle nervously, but hopefully. Obviously, this would be easy to straighten out. “I’m Addison McGhee,” I explained. “I know Addison was once a male name; so were Ashley and Leslie and Madison. I wore cotton balls on the cover of Vanity Fair. I’m on this month’s Celebrity Gourmet wearing a bib apron. I assure you, I am a woman.”
He stammered a bit, asked if I was joking, murmured something that approached an apology, then patched me through to the judge.
“That’s terrible,” the judge said. “Positively terri
ble. But still, easily fixed. Just hop down here and I’ll remarry you myself. No harm done.”
“We live in New York,” I said. “Can’t you just un-annul our wedding the same way you annulled it?”
The judge sucked air through his teeth in a that’s-a-tough-one tone and gave me some legal mumbo jumbo about having the authority to annul, but no authority to rescind an annulment.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Of course it doesn’t, honey,” he replied. “It’s the law.”
That night, I sat at the end of Hughes’s long dining room table, picking at my arugula and radish salad. It was a lovely salad, but come on: radishes? You simply can’t eat them if you have any hope of breathing near a man.
At any rate, when I remember that evening, I always picture Hughes seated at the other end of that long table, like half of a cartoonish, clichéd rich couple. But Hughes was, in fact, sitting right next to me. Just like a normal couple at dinner.
He was chewing slowly and smiling at me in sort of a goofy way and commenting between bites about how quickly the presidential thing blew over and how well it had worked out.
“Honey,” I said finally. “There’s a little problem.”
Chapter 21
Hughes said all the right things. He called it an outrage and an affront. I particularly remember his use of the word atrocity. His eyes got all crinkled up and he shook his fist a lot.
“And we should take a moment,” he said, as he pulled himself together and took a sip of wine, “to remember all the couples that do not have the resources and legal rights that we do.”
Giddy with relief, I agreed that we should. We even rose from our chairs for a moment to bow our heads and remember them.
Then Hughes said: “I’m sick of arugula. Let’s go to bed.”
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